The real baller move for someone worth 50M+ with rates as low as they have been, is take out loans against the 50M to live off of. Pay back the loans with rates less than the annualized market returns. Also limits/pushes out cap gain taxes.
> the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron was replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by international airline technician
This is wild speculation, based on second-hand information from your friend, who, given that they referred to it as electrical tape when anyone in the industry would know it's called speed tape and has no similarities with electrical tape, probably doesn't actually know which part of the aircraft is the aileron.
Speed tape on the wing is quite common anywhere in the world on any carrier, and is safe if done properly.
Lion Air and Indonesian aviation has a lot of problems in general, but I doubt this issue was genuinely a safety issue. Your friend probably felt some turbulence on landing.
While I don’t know the specifics here, many people mistake tape on airplanes for normal tape, when it is usually aluminum speed tape[0] that is (in the right scenario) safe to use on airplanes.
I am expat in south east asia and his comment is correct
low level officials taking bribes means you can do stuff like never wear a seatbelt, just pay the cop $20 USD if you get pulled over. get pulled up for smoking indoors? $20 USD. run over an illegal immigrant and kill them? USD 1000 to have their records completely erased. Sim card? $5 USD cash. rape? what? the police here hung up on my friend on a 911 call because they spoke english and not the 'national language' (police do speak english here).on a different note, it is legal to rape your wife here
low level corruption causes immense problems and injustices in society. here, everyone drink drives. driving a car while extremely drunk here is default behaviour.
ye high level official bribery will cause probelms, but the low level stuff is what completely craters the system and causes the catastrophic failures in complex engineering systems.
You said it better than I could. I am a US citizen, and most of my middle/upper-middle class colleagues simply cannot imagine that their society is the result of many hundreds of thousands of people following totally arbitrary rules, and that if people don't follow those rules their society will collapse. They think that US cops (who for the most part can't be bribed by citizens) are normal, and non-US cops who accept bribes are somehow exotic or abnormal.
That seems like a little bit of a non sequitur to the topic in this particular thread chain.
Anyway, yes of course they happen. They happen in every power producing industry. It's hard to find good numbers of course as there's going to be some amount of error, but here's one [1].
The point isn't that in that report nuclear has fewer deaths than wind and solar as I'm sure that will cause an emotional reaction. The point is that it's so low and comparable. Even if it was 10x worse it would be worth the tradeoff of replacing coal.
Nuclear is our only choice for replacing industrial scale use of coal and oil. It's unfortunate that that's the case, but those are the facts on the ground currently and there's no sign of that ever changing. The way Wind and Solar generate energy are wholly incompatible with high temperature industrial uses where coal and natural gas are used let alone the problems of variability (batteries help, but there are limits and batter manufacturing at scale brings its own challenges).
If you're comparing Nuclear to Wind and Solar power generation, you're comparing power sources that don't compete. Nuclear is about replacing the worst problems coal and oil present us and staving off global warming. It's an extremely critical and underdeveloped resource and only gets safer and better with time. It would be erroneous to state any risk in a vacuum - you have to compare it with what's happening today.
To boot, almost every time a nuclear reactor is decommissioned, it is replaced by more fossil fuel plants, not by renewable energy. You can’t be seriously opposed to climate change and nuclear energy at the same time.
I’ve learned there are two distinct groups of people who claim to be concerned about climate change. One group that sees it coming and sincerely wants to find viable solutions to the problem, and a much larger group who use it to fuel somewhat misanthropic psychological control issues. This second group spend most of their time thinking (and arguing!) about how other people are not riding bikes to work, not using reusable grocery bags, not buying electric vehicles, and voting in ways that they don’t like. They see Greta thunderberg as the solution to climate change, “if only we could shame enough people into riding their bike to work, we will save the planet,” they think. “If we just invest in solar” they say, never mentioning the tricky details like battery manufacture and placement, “we won’t solve the problem, because it’s too late for that, but it would be better.”
These people are not going to solve the problem of climate change. That’s not really what they are in it for. And so the much smaller first group of people, who aren’t focused on changing behaviors of other people (social control) are the only hope. They, the first group, are hampered at every turn by the second group. The second group indeed are the cause of “climate denialism.”
It’s good to learn to spot these people and simply not engage. When they make inane claims about nuclear being unsafe, just correct the record and move on.
Does that mean hydroelectric dams should be shut down?
Over the many decades of nuclear operation, there have been two major incidents: Chernobyl and Fukushima. And Chernobyl could probably have been prevented with a containment building.
I live with-in 50km of a nuclear power station: I'll take my chances with nuclear over climate change, given the choice.
Sure, if a professional struggles with it it's by definition not easy. It was however easier then the complex part: I was moving between states separately from my spouse when we were both working full time. This could not be properly handled by any online service available (yes, I tried at least 4 different) and I ended up with filling forms manually by myself. It should not be this hard in first place. And yes, likely there are a lot of pros who can file it easily but finding anyone who is good in what he is doing is not easy.
The "Pay-As-You-Earn" system was introduced in Australia and the UK during WW2 lol. The US has the same system its just been implemented extremely poorly
It's not that it's implemented poorly. It's that 1) the federal government collects multiple kinds of taxes out out of your paycheck. Social security, medicare and regular income tax are different. Income tax rates are progressive while the payroll taxes are flat but capped at a certain amount. 2) Additionally forty-two states have income taxes as do dozens of local municipalities. Consider that they also don't treat residents and non residents alike.
Consider a couple who live in New York City, where one partner works in Connecticut and the other works in New Jersey. There are potentially 6 different entities collecting income tax there.
That being said - fully agree - tax filing software should be free for everyone.
Furthermore, a number of states are starting to require tax returns to be filed even for short durations of working in the state for business purposes.
With $50m if your portfolio averages 4% a year you would be clearing $2m then pulling out $300k for 1.7 gain. You only pay tax on the income withdrawn